Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Sunday, June 29, 2014

The great
Columbian writer Gabriel García Márquez died on April 17 of this year. The
importance of García Márquez’s fictions determined that I must write something
about him in 2014 memoirs, and in preparation for an essay, I began rereading
his work, Love
in the Time Cholera. My own “disease,—if
you can call arthritis a disease—intervened as I was hospitalized for knee replacement.
Those few days, which interrupted my reading patterns, along with other review
assignments I received from the magazine Nth Position, distracted me from continuing. And, as much as I originally loved his
absolutely exemplary novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I read the year it was first
published, in 1967, I simply didn’t have the “one hundred years” of energy it seemed
to require on revisting that masterpiece.

To be honest, despite my recognition of
this author’s significance to 20th century writing, I feel his works
exemplify a kind of world construct of hierarchical values embedded in the
notion of realism, even in its “magical” variations, to which I am no longer
thoroughly attracted. García Márquez is
an ultimate storyteller, but his stories do not always represent a reality
which I can completely swallow.

Recently, however, I have been attending
to the films of Mexican film director Arturo Ripstein, and when I realized that
he had created a cinematic version of the Columbian’s novella, No One Writes to
the Colonel, I was immediately convinced
that writing on that work might better serve as my appreciation of great
writer, particular since this tale had few of the qualities of “magical realism,”
suggesting a somewhat more genuine—to my way thinking at least—observation of
human behavior.

Almost from the
very beginning of Arturo Ripstein’s highly moving film version of Gabriel
Garcła Márquez’s No One Writes to the Colonel,
we perceive the small, sleepy town in which Colonel (Fernando Luján) lives lies
in near stasis. Certainly the lives of the Colonel and his wife, Lola (Marisa
Paredes), have lived in the world of the past since the murder of their beloved
son, Agustin. Even their clock throughout the early part of the work is broken,
and after it is repaired, they are forced to sell it. Having put his house into
mortgage in order to pay for a proper burial for his son, the Colonel and his
wife, moreover, have survived with practically nothing to eat, both of them
lying to each other about having already eaten or being unable to consume
anything, in the wife’s case, due to asthma.

The Colonel, moreover, lives still in the
world of his youth, during which he fought, along with the Communists, in the Cristeros War (La Cristiada), the 1917 Mexican battles
waged against the clerics by then Mexican President Plutarco Elłas Calles in
his struggle to help peasants to gain property rights, a revolution which the
Catholic Church had opposed. Thousands were killed in the 10 year persecution
of Church and its believers.

By the time we meet the Colonel in the
1940s, the war and its results are a thing of the past, with the clerics
returned to power and, much to the Colonel’s dismay, allowed openly to pray and
to bless their parishioners publically. In the smuggled, evidently illegal,
newspapers that the town’s openly gay doctor (Odiseo Bichir) passes on to the
Colonel, the old man has read that all former soldiers will be paid a pension
consisting of a percentage of their former wages— money, quite obviously, which
he and Lola are desperate to obtain. But over the 21-year period since this
declaration, despite the Colonel having written the central government, no
money has arrived. The title proclaims
the reality that the Colonel, in his weekly strolls to dock to wait the arrival
of the mail-boat, does not truly want to admit—although the whole town
painfully witnesses his increasingly desperate disappointment. Reading the news
from the city, the Colonel admits a kind of defeat in his recognition that
“Everything is as it was.”

Although his loving wife certainly knows
that the money will never arrive, she, in a kind of tacit compact with her
husband and his ideals, keeps hoping for a miracle, hiding the fact that the
debtors are soon to evict them if their mortgage remains unpaid. The wonder of
this work is that, unlike so many of García Márquez’s writings, there is no
“magic” at work in their lives. The only thing of value they hold—other than
each other’s sometimes begrudging love—is “Blondie,” a fighting cock once owned
by their son, and the cause, so they are told, of his murder by a local
carnival worker, Nogales (Daniel Giménez Cacho), who also shared with Agustin
the love of the local prostitute, Julia (Selma Hayek).

There are figures who, knowing of the
Colonel and his wife’s situation, try to help, including the owner of a local
market (who kindness is defied by her daughter’s insistence that Lola pay for
anything she would like) and even the prostitute Julia, who buys a few
provisions just to help Lola and her husband survive. But the destitute couple
is too proud to even accept these insignificant provisions. We know from the
outset, alas, that this elderly couple cannot survive, and much as in Michael
Haneke’s 2012 Amour, theyhave only their love to temporarily
sustain them. And knowing that, we see their brave attempts to survive a bit
longer—the Coronel’s painful sale of “Blondie” to his corrupt former comrade in
battle, Don Sabas (Ernesto Yáñez), Lola’s sale of her wedding ring to the local
priest whose major community activity seems to be attending the weekly movies,
and their symbolic sale to a German of time itself, in their temporarily
restored clock—hardly matter; even the director and his writer, at times, seem
to forget the results of these demands and sacrifices (Did the sale of her ring
pay for the mortgage? Did the agents back off their attempts to evict the couple?),
particularly given the fact that the Colonel, missing the fighting cock, buys
it back with the intent to put it into competition.

In a sense, it doesn’t truly matter, for
the important thing is that this couple stands, in their steady love, against
almost everyone else in their community—including the kindly figures of Julia,
who claims that she cannot feel love, and the doctor, who leaves wife at home
in his search for sexual satisfaction with local young men. In two instances,
moreover, the Colonel proves that if the world around him has not changed, his
knowledge and actions represent a moral shift that some few (particularly Julia
and the village children) witness. Although everyone believes that Agustin has
died for the love of a woman, stabbed to death in a fighting-cock ring, the
Colonel gradually comes to comprehend that a banned underground newspaper his
son had hidden beneath his shirt has become transferred to his skin through the
moisture always present in this forever rainy village and the sweat of the
event; revealed as a political radical, Agustin, accordingly, has been executed
by Nogales not because of Julia but because of his political views. To most,
this shift of causation may seem like a minor detail in what is described by
his fellow citizens merely as “destiny.” But given the Colonel’s strong moral
code, the realization of the “truth” is everything.

The Colonel reveals that moral certitude
once more when, after his Blondie has been stolen from his house by locals (beating
Lola in the process) who wish to pit him against Nogales’ cock, the Colonel
refuses to allow the fight to continue—despite the fact that Nogales, in league
with the corrupt current government, offers the Colonel money and the payment
of his overlooked pension if he will allow the fight to continue. The Colonel
may be a dreamer and even a fool of sorts throughout Ripstein’s beautifully
crafted movie, but in his utter rejection of Nogales’ and the community’s
meaningless promises, he alters everything. Nothing after can ever again be as
it was, even if the town’s citizens might pretend things will go on as before.
The Colonel may hate the Church, but he is a believer of moral values stronger
than any other citizen of his Mexican coastal outpost, including the so-called
religious believers.

The film ends, as we knew it must, with a
dream of hope even within the reality of despair. Convinced his rooster will
win in the upcoming fight 45 days away, he sits as if about to wait out the
time in proud anticipation of the day when they can pay all their debts. When
his wife asks what they eat in the meantime, he answers, “shit,” a word which
ends this sad film. Like inverted cannibals, they now have no choice but to
consume themselves—bodies which, at least spiritually, are rich and sustaining.